In terms of literary history, Gerard Manley Hopkins has been difficult to pin down. Many of his concerns—industrialism, religious faith and doubt, science, language—were common among Victorian writers, but he is often championed as a proto-modernist despite that he avoids the self-conscious allusiveness and indirectness that typify much high modernist poetry. It is partly because Hopkins cannot be pigeonholed that his influence remains relevant. The Fire that Breaks brings together an international team of scholars to explore for the first time Hopkins’s extended influence on the poets and novelist who defined Anglo-American literature throughout the past century.

Daniel Westover is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English, East Tennessee State University.